I’ve complained before about this, and a bunch of people always attack me for it. Am I saying THEY’RE not serious readers? THEY can always find what THEY want to read. What’s the matter with ME? Am I a snob? No, I’m not a snob, but I had hoped I’d be able to use the Kindle for most if not all of my reading, and no such luck.I have one of the original Kindles, and the design is no big problem for me. What’s wrong with the Kindle is that I can’t read on it what I can’t obtain on it. Don’t tell me the catalogue "is growing" when all they’re doing is adding current titles and Gutenberg.org editions of out-of-print books. Even the public domain books are a joke. You can read the first volume of Arnold Bennett’s Clayhangers trilogy, and that’s it.I decided to familiarize myself with more Japanese authors. I have a stack of books beside me by Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Natsume Soseki, Kenzaburo Oe, Kobo Abe, Shusaku Endo, Ryu Murakami and Haruki Murakami. All these authors are famous, all these works have been translated into English. One of the names is the winner of the Nobel Prize. Although some of the publishers are small, they include Grove Press, Vintage International and New Directions. Not a single one of these books (and not a single other book by any of their authors) was available in a Kindle edition.I read systematically. If I want to read the Fagles translation of The Odyssey on a Kindle, I expect to read the Fagles translation of the Iliad too (the publisher sells them together in a boxed edition). Well I can’t. And if I decide to re-read Don Quixote, I want to read the recent and highly praised translation by Edith Grossman, not whatever public domain translation Amazon can offer me at no cost to themselves. I think a lot of people committing to a Kindle end up limiting their reading simply because they have to. I want to read what I want to read. When I carried my Kindle around, I soon realized, I ended up hitting a brick wall all the time as my interests were thwarted by the limitations of the library, and I kept fobbing myself off with books that weren’t my first or second or third choice. I couldn’t even find the potboiler elevator books I really wanted. Fatherland, by Robert Harris? Sorry, chum. How about Pompeii by Robert Harris instead? So I ended up reading Pompeii, resenting Amazon on every page because I wanted to be reading Fatherland.If I have to buy 75% of my books in paper editions anyway, why not all of them? Why have a Kindle at all?As a piece of equipment, the Kindle is very nice. As a tool for really serious readers, I’ve given up on it. They kept promising we’d soon be able to get hold of pretty much anything we wanted. When pigs fly. I haven’t picked it up in months, until last night. I thought they might have Sutton Vane’s play Outward Bound. After all, it was published in 1923 and is presumably now in the public domain. Maybe in an anthology? Nah, of course they didn’t. I don’t know why I bothered.

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